In his dense and symbolic works, in his layered and metaphorical colours, in the drafts whose chromatic material vibrates with vital enzymes: in his latest cycle, Michele Dolz works through allusive codes in a painting that suggests a complex and articulated reflection on the soul and its human arcana.
The title is taken from the song How Deep is the Ocean of Irving Berlin and is also inspired by another song, Com’è profondo il mare by Lucio Dalla: two texts that refer to the depths of man, to feelings of love and pain and unconscious abyss, to freedom and its limitation, the ascents and falls, passions, emotions and their erasure.
In his painting, Dolz creates a parallel sea, an imaginary space where the fish seem to become both the symbolic figures of the early Christian iconography and the Gospels and allegorical signs that speak of humanity itself, in the dialogue between the existence stretched in time and the timeless size of eternity, whose point of intersection can be represented just by crossing the flooded space where the archetypes dwell, by diving to depths where dreams reveal enigmatic messages.
Dolz’s art is suspended between iconic presence and abstraction, as if his fish figures became fragile reminescences traced in water, bound to disappear under streams and waves like feelings and memories erased by time, or to reappear perhaps as memory fragments emerged from the sands of oblivion and surfaced in the glow of rationality.
Dolz’s painting itself seems to be poised between matter and its negation, between a sandy and tactile colour lying on the support and a slight draft that paraphrases the liquid world of his symbolic ocean, in a vision where informal drops and spots seem to follow a path that runs through the night of the soul and is lighted with joy, then penetrates the shadows of melancholy and sheds a light of love, in a circular track between earth and sky, between the horizon of consciousness and the unconscious underwater space.
Thus, as a diver of the psyche, Dolz plunges into the waves and abysses of his metaphorical ocean, armed with the original instruments of drawing and painting, catching in his net sacred fish that come apart and are reborn endlessly, in a journey through darkness and light through that concealed sea where humans can catch the hidden precious stars in the depths of the soul.
Lorenzo Canova